[33.0] For whomst does the barrier come down?

Smiting can be convenient in its own way

The Markup, a newsroom covering Big Tech, recently published an article on the effects of courtroom digitization for payday disputes in Utah. What happens when, in the name of convenience and accessibility, punitive systems like debt collection and remediation are moved online? Does convenience beget justice? 

Long story short: no. 

Utah’s decision to migrate these kinds of court cases into cyberspace increased the rate of cases that resulted in a default judgment against defendants, which can lead to garnished wages and lowered credit scores. 

Looking at the West Valley City Justice Court, default judgments jumped from 43 percent before online courtrooms to 59 percent afterward. In the process of proselytizing its path to equality through the convenience of access to the US carceral system, boosters for this digital transformation forgot to evangelize the access point to their cybernetic alternative. That is: Nothing but the judgment meeting was digital. Everyone and everything else remained analog—including the summonses, which were mailed to defendants and provided confusing instructions, containing 50-character, case-sensitive URLs to join virtual courtrooms. 

“It feels like you’re getting screwed,” said one defendant interviewed by The Markup.

Beyond the hubris of thinking that digital equals better because of the “ease” of clicking buttons rather than attending court in-person—which ignores the need for technologies like phones, wifi, let alone know-how—technologizing broken systems can also make their most punitive tendencies easier to wield and scale. 

“The more efficient the system, the lower the marginal cost of debt collection, the more likely that repeat, high-interest lending predators will use the system to pursue borrowers,” said Chris Peterson, a University of Utah law professor. 

This begets a purgatorial and incessant cycle, wherein garnished wages and lowered credit scores can also keep borrowers indebted to payday providers, since other lenders might decline them from loans on the grounds of their shaky lending history. 

The “frictionless” myth of these technologies (the idea that smoother access to court cases will lead to fewer defaults) then creates stickiness offline: greater dependence on the very systems that brought people to court in the first place. In a quest to optimize by supplanting atoms with bits, this initiative actually made real life less efficient—“disrupting” through thoughtless, inchoate intervention.

The Markup’s analysis homes in on one locale within a specific U.S. state, but it’s useful to extrapolate and consider what sort of world-building lurks beneath cyber-debt-courts. Though I really, really strongly doubt that the metaverse will ever amount to anything (it’s tacky, Club Penguin and Neopets are way better, etc.), cyber-debt-courts share many of the same motivations as metaverse-related undertakings. Attempting to render everything digital in the (fulsome) name of equality through ubiquity and uniformity. Stumbling and causing harm in the process. 

Recall my postcard from Austin, Texas: Some metaverse boosters see the metaverse as an opportunity to erase discrimination by shedding ourselves of any visual markers of difference found in our IRL bodies. But, if anything, the opposite has come true. British media figure Yinka Bokinni visited different metaverse platforms for a documentary project; stripped of IRL social mechanisms that, though imperfect, demand some accountability, the metaverse functioned as an incubator for repulsive and violent behavior. Bokinni, who is a Black woman, witnessed underage users simulating oral sex, and she was subjected to sexual harrassment, racism, and rape jokes. 

“I know it’s not real, but when you’ve got that headset on, it really feels like you’re there – you can hear their actual voices, and wherever you move your head, the world travels with you,” she wrote in an article for The Guardian: 

It tricks your brain into thinking you’re really experiencing it. You forget it’s not real. It’s just so intimidating.

The worst thing is how numb you become. The casual way people were using extremely violent language that was homophobic, racist, sexist meant that after my third or fourth dive into the metaverse, I became desensitised to it. You could see it happening with other people, too. There were rooms where the most racist conversations were going on, and other people were just chilling, not paying attention. It’s a space in which it’s become normalized.

And, with most metaverse platforms functioning via AR/VR headsets and users’ real-life body movements, virtual attempts to violate others meant a user was engaging in those very movements in real life, wherever they were located. Their behavior functioned as practice and a way to normalize inherently harmful, non-consensual activity.

“Innovation” is a dangerously malleable and morally charged term beholden to the wants and worldviews of the subject. In that sense, it rhymes with religious terminology, which can be deployed by differing factions for their respective ends—“no your beliefs are sinful,” and so forth. Lending credence to the lexicon and accompanying practices of world-building systems (capitalism, Christianity, etc.) almost invariably offers a buyout to those already in power. And it makes all parties involved more reliant on those systems, from defendants beholden to vulturistic debt collection practices to metaverse users entering a new, cybernetic circle of hell. 

What are we converting to and for? And what’s brought us to a place where all-encompassing efforts to digitize everything can be branded as promising inevitabilities, only to be hotbeds for vile behavior? What technologies and spiritual worldviews made such a history and future possible? 

The next issue of this newsletter will dig into that history, linking courts to religion to morals. 

Divine Innovation is a somewhat cheeky newsletter on spirituality and technology. Published once every three weeks, it’s written by Adam Willems and edited by Vanessa Rae Haughton. Find the full archive here.